Why Can’t I See My Ads? – Redux

While managing PPC for clients one question comes up more than any other: “Why can’t I see my ads”? A few years ago this had a few answers – Keywords being bid on, time of day ads were being shown, IP address exlusions, etc. But more often than not, it has to do with budget constraints. Ads will not show up for every query possible – especially in the more competitive verticals (this would likely even prove to be unprofitable). While all of these reasons still exist, a whole new dimension has come into play and, unlike before the answer is, “well, where are you looking for your ads”?

Now that content network in Google has become a more viable solution in PPC marketing the question has changed slightly: “where can I see my ads” may be the future question of the PPC advertising space. By sculpting a campaign to take advantage of the opportunities the content network actually does provide, many industries have seen incredible conversion rates. That’s absolutely great… but where do these conversions actually come from? Where are these ads seen?

I don’t believe Google will ever have a fully disclosed list of their content network partners… such lists would become obsolete as soon as they were published due to how frequently sites opt in or out as content providers (AdSense users). What they do offer is a Placement Performance report. From this report it is possible to see some of the sites and pages on which content advertisements appear. This is great for narrowing the scope of where your content ads are showing – you can block out certain domains based on how well they have been converting.

This is a great feature to enable advertisers to exercise more control. But that’s not all. The ability to target by placement on the content network has let advertisers pick specific sites and even themes that they would like to show ads on more frequently. Not only can you pick the site you want to show on, but the choice can, in many cases, be further narrowed down to specific pages on a site. This is all done on the ad group level – for more info, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=enhanced_campaigns.cs

By taking advantage of these recent features the answer to “where are my ads?” becomes much more manageable.